Left 4 Dead Survival Pack in the Wild

It's been five months since Valve unleashed Left 4 Dead on PC and Xbox 360 gamers, and since then, countless millions of zombies have been gunned down. Valve has now released the long-awaited Survival Pack, a free download that adds features missing from the original game and a whole new mode designed for fast, frantic play. The Survival Pack is available for download right now on the Xbox Live Marketplace for Xbox 360 players and Steam for the PC version.

In March, we were among the very first outside of Valve to see the Survival Pack in development. (You can read our report for an introduction to the DLC.) While at Valve, we had a chance to play with the designers themselves, and while that was educational, it was also a bit unusual; it's not every day you get to play with the ultimate insiders. They developers know every trick in the book, and have plenty of experience working playing the game. Of course, it also helped that we were all seated around the same conference table, which made communication simple. Now that the Survival Pack is in the wild, it was interesting to go online to see how gamers are taking to the new content.

Pure multiplayer mayhem in Versus Mode.

Judging from some online play this morning, there's going to be a learning curve as people figure out some of this stuff. For instance, on Lighthouse, the only real "new" map in the Survival Pack, gamers were busy trying to figure out the best place to try and hole up against the zombie horde. The answer is really nowhere, as that's probably the toughest of all the maps in the game, due to the fact that the zombies can tear down many walls to gain access to pretty much every room. Even staying atop the Lighthouse tower itself is dangerous, since you're exposed to smokers who can grab you with their tongue and pull you off the roof. Or, you get too close to a ledge, fall, and grab the ledge; you're left dangling helplessly until someone pulls you up.

Playing Survival Mode is also a pleasure in watching people react to the unfairness of it all. You're swamped by waves of the horde (the mindless zombies) while the game spawns in multiple special zombies continually. If you're used to the ebb-and-flow of the regular Left 4 Dead mode, you're in for a shock when you won't have time to breathe, let alone reload or heal, during Survival Mode. You also really can't split up when in Survival Mode; if you're by yourself, you're far too easy to pick off for the special zombies, whether it is a hunter who leaps atop you, a smoker who grabs you, or a boomer that vomits on you.

None of our Survival Mode rounds got past four minutes, which is the minimum to earn a bronze time. It's hard to imagine getting past 10 minutes, considering how quickly the difficulty ramps up. It's going to take a lot of skill and pure luck. The motivation is going to be the new leaderboards, which let you compare your best time against everyone else. You can also battle for your own personal best times, as well. But Survival Mode is just great if you want to blow some steam and have an absolutely silly time shooting zombies and fighting for your life without having to commit to playing an entire campaign.

That's not a good place to be.

You can also play on Survival Mode on 15 other maps, all taken from existing campaigns and modified in some way. For instance, the airport lobby from Dead Air is a level, but you might discover that the corridors are blocked off, so you can't flee toward a certain room that you like to use when playing in Versus Mode or the regular co-op campaign.

Speaking of Versus Mode, Survival Pack adds Versus Modes for the Dead Air and Death Toll campaigns, effectively doubling the number of Versus Modes campaigns. That's good news for those who have played Versus Mode on No Mercy and Blood Harvest to death. Beware, though, that Death Toll as the humans seems to be particularly brutal. The opening maps of the Death Toll campaign have you going underground through sewer and tunnel systems, and there are plenty of places for the other team (playing as the special zombies) to hide and set up ambushes. The first we played Death Toll in Versus, our human team was wiped out within sight of the start of the level. We got even, though, as we were able to wipe out the human team repeatedly on following levels.

The Survival Pack makes an already great multiplayer experience even better, and the fact that it's completely free makes it a complete no brainer for every Left 4 Dead fan to pick up. Valve is shipping a Game of the Year edition that bundles the original game and the Survival Pack, but that's for those who haven't bought the game yet. If you already own Left 4 Dead, then head over to Xbox Live Marketplace to download for the Xbox 360, or just launch the game on Steam on your PC and it'll automatically update.